Tag Archives: drought

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am not a big believer in global warming, to say the least. Both the Vancouver newspapers with a decidedly leftward tilt, however, are all in on AGW.

I used to get upset with them about publishing articles that were clearly not done by climate scientists but came from some US-based advocacy group. They were cleverly disguised to look like a scientific study but you could never figure out any scientific group that had actually performed it.

So, I’d write them an email asking what peer-reviewed study this article came from. I said it was lazy reporting for their so-called journalists to simple publish some press release they received from a California anti-carbon group. They would never publish any of my letters to the editor pointing out the disinformation from the AGW crowd.

2015 was a drought year in the Pacific NW. The big sea of unusually warm water sitting out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean called an El Nino condition caused an unusually hot and dry summer. The summer and early fall were marked by frequent and serious forest fires.

The flip side of the El Nino event is the La Nina condition with colder than normal masses of water in the central Pacific. This is part of a normal cycle called the ENSO or the El Nino Southern Oscillation and reverses every seven to twelve years. The NOAA website says “… the ENSO has large scale impacts on global weather and climate.”

The people who study this stuff were predicting last fall that the El Nino was falling apart and the La Nina was taking over. A La Nina year usually means a cooler and wetter year in the PNW. So, it baffled me why a purported “expert” on water resources would confidently predict another exceptionally dry year in which Vancouver would likely have to ration water and allocate more money to fight forest fires. The underlying assumption on his part was that global warming would cause drought and less rainfall. AGW does not cause droughts in the PNW but an El Nino year can and does frequently.

One would hope that a “water expert” would know this fact. Apparently not. He confidently predicted that 2016 would be as dry and possibly worse, requiring rationing of water. “The Province” published his scare prediction on December 19 and ran a full-page headline stating, “Brace for Another Drought Crisis”. The teaser underneath stated, “Recent precipitation has replenished Metro Vancouver reservoirs but a water expert warns the worst is yet to come.”

I cut out the front page and the full-page article on the inside and set it aside. I said to myself, “Let see what actually happens.” I had just finished reading a book called “Future Babble” by Dan Gardner, a senior writer for the “Ottawa Citizen”. He had come to my attention a number of years ago when he wrote a 10 part series on drugs. Carefully researched and even-handedly written, I thought it was excellent. When I learned he had published a book, I had to read it.

Gardner carefully documented his study of “experts” and the success of their pontificated predictions on many subjects. He found that the experts were correct only about half the time and you could do just as well with a coin flip. He cites some highly public failures and how they shrug off their mistakes to make yet another sweeping prediction. Two examples among many in the book were Revi Batra who published a best selling book in 1985 called “The Great Depression of 1990.” Of course, that didn’t happen. Did he run off and hide from the press? Nope. He published numerous other books in subsequent years making pretty much the same predictions for future years and all did not happen.

Similarly, Paul Ehrlich who I have mentioned frequently, published “The Population Bomb” in 1968 predicting some 200 million people would die of starvation in the 1980’s. Obviously, did not happen, but did not deter him from continuing to predict and publish, appearing on talk shows and giving speeches. You gotta hand it to these guys, they have a lot of gall.

If Al Gore had been right, Florida would be underwater by now and the oceans would be 20 feet higher by the end of the century. But, the oceans are only rising less than 1/8th inch per year, the same pace since the end of the last ice age. He should miss it by 19 feet!

One expert in England predicted that children in school now would never have seen snow in their lifetimes. Nope. Wrong.

The La Nina took over in the central Pacific and it’s been a colder and wetter summer in the PNW as one would expect in a La Nina year. I checked with the various weather sites and BC has had a normal amount of moisture this year and September has been unusually wet this year. Subsequently, forest fires were minimal this summer.

Our water expert can join a long list of expert predictions that were totally wrong.

WHY “DICK’S PIZZA”?

A long time ago, back when the Blog Master was a child, telephone solicitation was becoming a commonplace dinnertime annoyance. Dick, being a clever guy (read: smart a**), would answer the phone "Dick's Pizza" which, more often than not, would cause the solicitor to think he had called a business and hang up. I thought it was funny, and it stuck with me.

In this forum, Dick has a variety of stories--some with some real meat to it, with a little spice thrown in, sometimes he's saucy, sometimes cheesy. And it's all laid out by a crusty old guy. Somehow PIZZA seems appropriate.

K

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-Dick